In addition to the test releases, the nightly trees will usually be installable.

Historically Test and General Availability releases happen at 10:00am Eastern US Time, which is either 1400UTC or 1500UTC depending on daylight savings.

Glossary

Development freeze: The package set is frozen. Only packages that fix significant issues found in testing are added to the tree.

Feature freeze: All features must be complete in a testable state. Anything that's not will either be dropped or reverted.

String freeze: Packages which we are the 'upstream' for freeze their translatable strings. No new strings should be added without notifying the L10n team. ( more info )

Translation freeze: Packages which we are the 'upstream' for should pull translations and be repackaged after this date. Translations made up to this point are guaranteed to be in the release. ( more info )

Schedule Rationale

A 5 month development schedule has been planned for Fedora 8 in order to get into a regular and predictable release schedule with a new release every 6 months. Having a new release on April and October moves development forward without getting distracted with winter holidays and Red Hat fiscal quarters.